Self-Help for the Brain is Simple
Notable highlights from a re-read of the Navalmanack, Oculus founder's profile, life goals of dead people, and more
There is something soothing about reading self-help books. It feels good to imagine what your future could look like, even if you know nothing will change unless you put some of it into action.
The one exception here might be reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (which you can read for free!). The book many times realizes the difference between advice and application quite quickly within some of Naval’s philosophies on life. For example:
“When it comes to medicines for the mind, the placebo effect is 100 percent effective. When it comes to your mind, you want to be positively inclined, not incredulous in belief. If it is fully internal, you should have a positive mindset…
…Just being very aware in every moment. If I catch myself judging somebody, I can stop myself and say, “What’s the positive interpretation of this?” I used to get annoyed about things. Now I always look for the positive side of it. It used to take a rational effort. It used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive. Now I can do it sub-second.”
I think I audibly scoffed after I read this passage. Then I realized the irony.
It reminded me of how psychologists prescribe cognitive behavioral therapy. And in this case, he was applying it to change his mindset on life. Would it work for everyone?
Unlike most self-help books that tell you the benefits of 100 pushups every day for the rest of your life or to immediately cold approach five cute girls after you finish the passage, the Alamanack of Naval is rather his philosophy that always resonated with me immediately.
Wealth First → Happiness Second
Naval first gained notoriety through entrepreneurship, founding a few companies and investing in into some well-known ones (Twitter, Uber, etc..) finally moving towards wisdom and unique platitudes on life. And the book also follows the same journey of the typical Silicon Valley founder: first on achieving wealth, then health, and finally happiness.
The first time I read it, I was in year one of building my startup and blown away by concepts in the “wealth” section like the advantage of specific knowledge, utilizing leverage, and embarrassingly, the concept that building wealth was not zero sum.
“But the reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago. 200 years ago nobody had antibiotics. Nobody had cars. Nobody had electricity. Nobody had the iPhone. All of these things are inventions that have made us wealthier as a species.
Today, I would rather be a poor person in a First World country, than be a rich person in Louis the XIV’s France. I’d rather be a poor person today than aristocrat back then. That’s because of wealth creation.”
On my third re-read last month, interestingly the sections on happiness certainly spoke to me more. And I wondered what that meant about where I was in life and what I was personally now looking for.
Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.
We are highly judgmental survival-and-replication machines. We constantly walk around thinking, “I need this,” or “I need that,” trapped in the web of desires. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or to plan something.
My parents have told me growing up I was always more a happy kid. Maybe genetically from my mom’s dad, who was always generally jovial. The idea of finding hacks to happiness like changing judgement almost seems antithesis to what I’d find naturally strange.
But there is a worry that this pre-disposition to happiness may not survive when my body doesn’t allow me to surf or when the busyness of familial life rears its head.
And so seeking out answers is one way to prolong the inevitable. But then couldn’t I just change my mindset?
You absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it is the first time it’s thrown at you. We accumulate all these habits. We put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to them. “I’m Naval. This is the way I am.”
It’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, “Okay, this is a habit I probably picked up when I was a toddler trying to get my parent’s attention. Now I’ve reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it a part of my identity. Does it still serve me? Does it make me happier? Does it make me healthier? Does it make me accomplish whatever I set out to accomplish?
It’s an interesting thought experiment. Are we truly this malleable in the world? Is it as simple as doing identity surgery, dissecting and removing the bad parts and adding back the good parts I want to keep?
People spend billions of dollars on the self-help hacks, routines, and protocols to make ourselves better. For myself, an acid trip certainly helps with imprinting this completely on my psyche at times. Though what comes out in radical change is always different.
It’s a great book and overall I find I’m learning new things on every re-read. And I think it speaks to the staying power of what I personally believe to be true and what most of us strive for in the long term. At the end of the day we have ourselves, our brain, and not much else more in this blink of time in the universe.
Things to Share
The profile of Palmer Luckey depicts what I assumed was a neckbeard but in real looks much more normal (I’m guessing something had to change after selling Oculus for billions of dollars). He and I are similar in that we both are around the same age and both liked Yu-gi-oh growing up. From the article:
One of those series was Yu-Gi-Oh!, which began its run in 1998, when Luckey was six. As a kid, his favorite character was the antihero, Seto Kaiba, an orphan adopted by the CEO of a weapons manufacturing mega-conglomerate, the Kaiba Corporation. He is a brilliant computer hacker, hardware engineer, and electrical engineer, who’s always five steps ahead of everyone else. When his adoptive father dies, Seto Kaiba inherits the weapons manufacturing empire, and uses the money to launch a series of virtual reality video games.
After he pointed out the Seto Kaiba figurine sitting on a mantel behind me, I asked the obvious question: Your favorite fictional character as a little kid had a weapons manufacturing empire and built virtual reality video games?
My favorite character was Joey. What a mistake.
Here are some life goals of dead people. Make sure that you’re not trying to aspire to something that dead people are always going to be better at.
From Astral Codex Ten, a write up and understanding of Nietzschean philosophy, perspectives of morality, and explaining how people rationalize good in the world.
Here’s an OG post from Mr. Money Mustache on frugality and why it’s good for the world. His philosophy is one part environmentalism, another part minimalism, and a bit of stoicism in between. An interesting third party perspective on how it plays out in life though can be read from a profile on him from the New Yorker (2016). Revisiting both - it’s an insight into what life is like when you truly go “monk mode” with your desires. Fun fact, he retired with $600K saved up because the 4% rule granted him and his family could spend $2000/month and sustain off of it forever. It’s a fantasy for myself to indulge in as I try to imagine a world where I stop working today and try to emulate a similar result. But at the end of the day - I think it’s not exactly for me.